Tom Chiarella atones for his own childhood shopping sins by way of learning his children's shopping rules

Shopping with children can be an epic misery. I stood in a Nordstrom last winter and watched a towheaded eight-year-old shitbird, not one day out of third grade, actually take a swing at his mom after she struggled to pull a sweater over his outsized melon. I proceeded to text my mother a blanket apology for my entire life.

I know that as a kid I was an authentic pain in the ass on shopping trips — whiny, impatient, and undiscerning. I despised trying on pants, liked the shirts I already had just fine, and had no patience for my mother's suggestions. My two sons had some measure of the same diffidence in them as boys. I never spoiled for the fight. Instead I made a sport out of buying a season's worth of clothes, piling armful after armful on the counter as the two of them stood by, in a seventeen-minute breeze through the Gap. When my older son finally asked for some autonomy in the process, I offered him a budget if he could start to establish a style, which I said meant making a few decisions before he went through the doorway of the store. "Tell me one rule about clothes you like," I said. His first rule, at the age of nine: no buttons. I did not argue. The rules piled up after that, a list that grew and changed as the clockwork of adolescence took its mighty ticks. No collars, nothing green, all shirts must be black. Like that. I limited him to three at a time, and sometimes asked him to explain. I rarely argued. They were his rules. You gotta have rules about what goes in your closet.

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Now I've come to the point where I learn by watching my sons shop. They avoid malls, prowl vintage stores, buy funky T-shirts in bowling alleys and Goodwills. My older son, nineteen now, works the floor of a store with bloodless, mechanical speed but rarely buys. He's a wiry kid, knows his size precisely. If I do make a suggestion, he counters with a surprisingly sensible code. His pants must fit precisely. He doesn't like to buy in bulk, except for socks and underwear. "I only like to make a big hit once in a while, you know?" he said to me recently. "A good coat is the only thing worth paying full retail."

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At sixteen, the younger son always wants me to take a look at some pair of lime-green running shoes, a fluorescent-colored sweat suit, and pants that are too tight. He buys as if he were putting me on a perpetual dare. If he wants me to cringe at the sight of him wearing Elton John glasses, I can bear it because I know his rules. He likes a good tie, looks good in a sport coat, and the lime-green shoes, well, they remind me of only one person: him. Sure we argue, but in the end I give in to their rules. They are not my rules, of course. But the purest epiphany of parenthood may be the simple realization that your children are not you. Maybe they would never pick what I would choose. And the pleasure of it — for each of us — is that they never will have to again.